Crazy Is, Crazy Does

Michelle Goldberg and Michael Dougherty did a dialogue on Bloggingheads recently in which they discussed the events in Norway.  Their analysis was a bit weak, likely due to Goldberg not wanting to come across as trying to score political points by associating too closely Dougherty and his fellow right-wingers with Andrew Breivik.  Of course, Breivik had associated himself with them quite explicitly.


I felt like Goldberg and Dougherty were dancing around this issue, which I wanted to speak to. That is, that while Breivik's actions were crazy, they were more logical the more seriously you take take the propositions underlying much of right-wing nationalist rhetoric regarding Islam.

Dougherty said at one point that he might have agreed with some of what Breivik was saying - or at least that his fellow conservatives did (it is clear that Breivik's thinking was based on assumptions that paralleled that of the the nationalist right). But Dougherty wanted change to come democratically, by working within the system.

So, the take-away for him was that he now understood how wrong it was for those on the right to unfairly tarnish all Muslims with the deeds of the crazy few. That's a fair point, to a degree.

But here's my problem with that. Muslims are certainly more diverse in opinion than the nationalist right. This is true to the extent that the vast majority of them share almost zero assumptions in parallel with what is driving Islamist jihad. They don't see America as an evil. They don't want to overthrow it. They don't want to establish "sharia" law. They believe in democracy and pluralism. The only grievances they share are likely due to the fact that a portion of Muslims are going to be right wing nationalists!

Yet a great deal of the grievances right wing nationalists have are shared by Breivik. Furthermore, many of these grievances, appearing in a variety of forms, from a variety of right-wing thinkers, were expressed in vivid evocation of Islam as an existential threat. To many, the result was always going to be violence. After 9/11, otherwise reasonable people regularly spoke of "glassing" the middle east. I shouldn't have to compile a list of the angry, hateful rhetoric, only to illustrate that it was clearly rooted in an idea that an existential threat was coming.

So, political talk gets heated. People say things they don't really mean. But after a while, you get the feeling that, no, they actually do mean them. Many wanted to ban sharia law, and Mosques for crying out loud.  (This Thom Hartmann video describes the level of Islamophobic rhetoric pretty well.)  I am pretty sure that, like Dougherty, most on the right wanted to work within the system.

But who knows how many did not? This graph shows pretty clearly that something has been brewing.

I don't think I'm being paranoid. Timothy McVeigh was part of something not entirely different. Again, the rhetoric was of an existential threat. The government had been taken over, and it was up to us to take the law into our own hands. There was a pretty straightforward logic to his actions.

I mean, of course he was crazy, right? Who would do such a thing? Well, someone who actually believed the rhetoric, who took it seriously. Why wouldn't he then take the implications seriously?

Breivik believed that a great Islamic horde was going to take over Europe, and his country. I can only imagine that if Hispanic immigrants in America were Muslim, right wing nationalism would be that much more vitriolic and paranoid. And the consequences would be just as inevitable.

Who Are We?

Judith Butler is a Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at University of California Berkeley.  In a recent interview she discusses her latest book, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
 A fierce critic of war, or at least our seeming endless tolerance for it, she has harsh words for Obama, who she says has not nearly been the critic of war she would have liked him to be.  But, as a philosopher, she's more interested in getting at deeper questions, and tries to see how we end up where we do.

Along with many other people, I am trying to contest the notion that we can only value, shelter, and grieve those lives that share a common language or cultural sameness with ourselves. The point is not so much to extend our capacity for compassion, but to understand that ethical relations have to cross both cultural and geographical distance. Given that there is global interdependency in relation to the environment, food supply and distribution, and war, do we not need to understand the bonds that we have to those we do not know or have never chosen? This takes us beyond communitarianism and nationalism alike. Or so I hope.

I think before entering warfare one needs to ask oneself whether, if it were to take place in their own country, they would fight in the same way.  If the answer is yes, then there is no moral hypocrisy.  But as soon as you begin to think of the lives of inhabitants of some far off land as less meaningful than those of your countrymen, you've begun to lose your humanity.

A similar thought occurred to me today, albeit on a much different subject.  We are putting an addition on our house, which is about 2 hours from the Mexican border.  Many in our community are migrant workers, some legal, some not.  Well, a couple of Mexicans came to my door, speaking very poor English, and offered a bid to stucco the exterior walls.  I thanked them for the offer, and said I'd give their card to the contractor - who as it happens has at least one undocumented worker in his employ.

I wondered how I felt about profiting from illegal labor - certainly their wages would be a drag on those of naturalized citizens.  How would I like it if an undocumented Mexican was able to compete for my job as a teacher?  And what if that meant a substantial pay cut?

I'm not sure I would have a problem with it.  I mean, sure, I want to get paid as much as I can.  But what right do I have over anyone else, if they can the do the same job for less?  What right do I have, just because the uterus I came out of 34 years ago just happened to have been a US citizen?  We only need to go a handful of uteruses back and my family tree would have been the ones doing the displacement.

Nationalism, while a useful and nostalgic concept, can lead to the most base sort of inhumanity and objectification.  What other tendency of human thought can be so soaked in the blood of injustice than provincial arrogance and arbitrary righteousness?  Such despicable, beast-like behavior.  Every man for himself, this is my lifeboat, get out.  The post-hoc rationalizations fill endless volumes of rhetoric down through the centuries.  They trickle slowly through the days like sticky-saccharine. 

Looking back, we've come so far.  But we have so far to go still.

The Morally Relative Right

Gen. David Petraeus argued against the use of torture today on Meet The Press:

 I have always been on the record, in fact, since 2003, with the concept of living our values.  And I think that whenever we have, perhaps, taken expedient measures, they have turned around and bitten us in the backside.  We decided early on in the 101st Airborne Division we're just going to--look, we just said we'd decide to obey the Geneva Convention, to, to move forward with that.  That has, I think, stood elements in good stead....  Because in the cases where that is not true, we end up paying a price for it ultimately.  Abu Ghraib and other situations like that are nonbiodegradables.  They don't go away.  The enemy continues to beat you with them like a stick in the Central Command area of responsibility.  Beyond that, frankly, we have found that the use of the interrogation methods in the Army Field Manual that was given, the force of law by Congress, that that works.

Sounds reasonable to me, especially given the great likelihood it simply doesn't work anyway.  Unfortunately, modern conservatism has embraced the Cheney model on torture.  A long-standing critique on the right has been the left's supposed moral relativism.  I think that accusation is actually wrong, but I'll get to that in a minute.   What's really bizarre to me is that contemporary conservatism gets about as close to moral relativism as you'd find.  I know very few people who would agree with the premise: different people have different morals and so it is wrong to criticize someone else's behavior, even if you disagree with it. 

Many liberals are sensitive to the fact that those with power have often taken advantage of other peoples in the name of righteous moral authority when in reality all they were doing is justifying their own sick fantasies of domination and exploitation.  But you'd be hard-pressed to find any liberal who actually believes that it is OK for someone else to do something that he himself considers wrong.  He may not want to start a war over it, but he'll still oppose it on principle.

The right, especially in its Christianist form, has often confused this proper definition of moral relativism with the empirical fact that human morality is relative to human thought; i.e. we decide our own morality.  While the general universality of human cultural morality is indicative of common biological and cultural structures, the existence of many nuanced moral beliefs is a testament to a relativity.  I think the confusion lies in the fundamentalist belief in absolute moral truths as handed down from God, specifically via biblical teaching. 

And yet here we find the purest example of people who could truly be considered relativists in the proper sense: because American superiority is ordained by God, then basically whatever we can claim to do in the name of America is morally correct.  The bible doesn't specifically forbid using "enhanced interrogation" on your enemies, and because doing so could be rationalized as good for America, then it is perfectly acceptable.  The moral has become entirely subjective to the interpretive whims of he who acts in God's name. 

This was always the problem with the fundamentalist argument for absolute morality.  Even if an absolute existed, it would still have to be revealed somehow to man.  And yet we end up right back at the beginning: stuck trying to decide which interpretation of the divine is correct.  And aside from actually experiencing some clairvoyant direct line to God, we're forced to use reason. 

Karen Armstrong refers to fundamentalists being left to "practice poor reason & poor religion", in that the one inevitably interferes with the other.  In this way, those who take a fundamentalist approach to American identity and morality will essentially be practicing poor reason and poor patriotism.